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SO Robert De Niro built a bigger, fatter and steeper penthouse atop his newly opened $43 million Greenwich Hotel than the plan the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved in 2004. Even though he did get approvals from other city boards, a few neighbors and “preservation advocates” now insist that he tear it down, despite the $1.5 million demolition price tag.

“Sheer greed,” fumed one activist at the Landmarks hearing. “Who does he think he is?” asked an audience member.

Well, he’s the man who opened the Tribeca Grill in 1990 and started the Tribeca Film Center after 9/11. Indeed, he began investing in the neighborhood in the mid-’80s, when New York Times stories routinely described it as “depressing” and “gloomy.”

But there’s more wrong here than a few ungrateful hipsters.

Do we want more people to be able to afford to live and work in the city? If so, we need to keep an eye on how regulations drive up construction and development costs.

New York’s construction costs are far higher than any other city’s – about double Chicago’s, for example. In a forthcoming Manhattan Institute study, economist Rosemary Scanlon points to two major causes: high land cost and excessive regulatory burden – which are hitting De Niro with a double whammy.

If we want to keep New York affordable, then we want property owners to use their entire space as efficiently as possible.

And we want them to go up – especially if they can do so fairly unobtrusively, as De Niro did.

Denying owners the ability to go up just boosts the already exorbitant cost of land – benefiting speculators and hurting the rest of us. Rooftop development has long been a mainstay of London, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other successful high-cost cities.

What’s more, New York’s undeveloped rooftops seldom look good. Consider the complaint from the Historic Districts Council – namely, that De Niro’s penthouse makes the hotel “appear more residential and fussy than industrial” and is not like the “mechanical-style rooftop addition that is normally found on Tribeca rooftops.”

In other words, preservation advocates urge the protection of what most folks consider ugly.

Tribeca was one of the first New York neighborhoods to see a spate of attractive penthouses and rooftops – in part because it existed beneath the regulatory radar screen in the ’70s and ’80s. But now the regulatory agencies are paying far closer attention, which almost invariably means more regulatory hurdles and increased costs.

As “base” construction costs soar – copper-mill prices, for example, are up 185 percent since 2003, says Scanlon – it’s imperative for the city to moderate any costs it can. Mayor Bloomberg should instruct his commissioners: Don’t impose unnecessary costs on entrepreneurs and developers.